Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Some gardeners suggest that the best way to harvest edamame is to pull out the entire plant and then pluck off the beans. The rationale is that the edamame tend to ripen at the same time, so there's no point to leaving the plant in the garden. It also eliminates the tedious bending and searching for mature edamame. But it takes fortitude to yank up a perfectly healthy vegetable plant, especially one that is still growing and flowering, so we chose to leave the plants in the ground and harvest the mature edamame every few weeks. Our approach produced edamame all summer, plus a massive late crop of edamame that we harvested this week. The plants were loaded from top to bottom with the last beans of the season, so laden with pods that the plants were drooping under the weight of the soybeans. With no new flowers in sight, and few immature pods that needed more time to mature, we finally pulled up the plants. Just four plants yielded several pounds of gorgeous, fat edamame pods.

Now the tough decision -- how to use them. One of our favorite weeknight dinners is a Japanese dish using green tea buckwheat soba noodles. This dish is heavy on the protein (using both edamame and tofu), and the green noodles look beautiful with our freshly picked edamame. The noodles are also surprisingly hearty, making for a very filling meal. We use fresh tofu, but packaged works just as well. For that matter, if you don't have any fresh edamame, frozen are fine. Make sure you select the beans that have already been removed from the pods.

I was growing edamame 20 years ago before they were "cool" and agree with your harvesting suggestions. The shelled beans freeze very well and are terrific in recipes like this one. They make a great 'succotash' combined with corn. This is a veg more folks should discover!